


Eyeshine

by Mauser_Frau



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Claustrophobia, Complex Relationship, Dead animals, Emotional Manipulation, Existential Dread, Gen, Pretentious Literary References, Relationship Study, Sibling Relationship, Troy Calypso POV, Typhon being a dirtbag, Tyreen being Tyreen, Violence, addresses THAT ECHO log, building off of canon, dammit tyreen what are you even reading, rather a lot of drool, surreal goings on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 7,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28234746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauser_Frau/pseuds/Mauser_Frau
Summary: Troy and Tyreen are stuck alone together in a small ship after the events of "No Coming Back II".  Troy's trust in Tyreen doesn't seem to be the only thing that's broken.  There's something very strange going on with the audio, the navigation and maybe the fundamental workings of their repurposed engine.Told in vignettes.  Includes a transcription and extension of said ECHO log [CH6], Troy showing off his tech smarts and a whole lot of quiet dread.  Part ofGrimeverseand references several eccentric details from that collection, but stands on its own.2/8/2021: we have crossed the halfway point!
Kudos: 4
Collections: Grimeverse





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kingcharon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingcharon/gifts), [kriegslastbraincell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kriegslastbraincell/gifts).



The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black, someplace careening far out of reach of the rest of the universe. 

This wasn’t Pandora. This wasn’t the Pandoran system. Or any system. This was nothing.

It felt like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed. A word from either of them would disturb this.

Troy fumbled into a few. He needed to say something before his sister did. “Stars move, you know.”

“It’s only been like twenty years,” said Tyreen. “They can’t move that fast. We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand. Did she care that the cluster Nekrotafeyo occupied spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that fact had choked the navigation system? He decided to summarize. “I think the computer’s a little off and umm…”

“Umm,  _ what _ ?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She went livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end. 

“Look, we jumped fine. We can’t run out of power. We have water. We have food. We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we?”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen. He let his vision float to the stars. Darkness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only lights thick enough to make mist out of one another. “I don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and pushed off towards the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021. Music to be posted at the end, but "A Posteriori" by Enigma is an ace choice in the meantime.


	2. Chapter 2

In zero g, Troy kept twisting to his left to press, drive, founder. The hours they’d spent piloting the shuttle out of Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well left him spotted with bruises.

Still, he hated to turn their gravity back on. Some curious part of him enjoyed watching Tyreen float above the bed with the covers billowing around her. She seemed  _ right _ like that, singular and uncomplicated and pissed off. Perfectly Tyreen.

The Coeus reader flickered again. She groaned and set it loose to float through the cabin. Troy caught it. The screen lit in his palm.

She was reading  _ Sexing the Cherry _ . “He liked to come home to me smelling of their blood,” Troy read aloud, out of habit, unsure if this sentence was supposed to come off erotic. His sister often smelled like blood. She came home too. Was that sexy? Somehow? To someone?

She said, “Hey, turn the heavy back on. I gotta piss.” 

“Alright. On three. Three.” He threw the switch. His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console. 

Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor. 

Tyreen landed with a thump. She pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door. One of them shrieked after her like killdeer they somewhat resembled. Troy shushed it and went back to the operations console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body. He pulled up the extrapolation program. Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing. It ticked away. 

The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known groupings. Color seemed a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts. Besides, he kept imagining that he had somehow spied the white supergiant Pandora circled. He wasn’t able to keep his eyes on it though, or find it again once he’d blinked.

Troy considered asking his sister to try. She was the Siren here. She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was also still in the water closet. 

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed through the hard drive’s superstructure. 

The shuttle had been rigged for an amateur pilot, cheerful art for its console icons and three to four confirmations needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity switch or sublight engine speed. He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork. 

Every system he ran checks on responded in good order. He’d done the same routine twice before they’d jumped. The only difference was a few hours and thousands of light years to nowhere. 

He even dug into the audio settings. If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her that  _ everything _ was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder. Troy thought about moving them, but the system complained when he tried.

Tempted again, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

Troy leaned over a speaker and hit play.

He heard his father say: “Well, if this isn’t some sweet dame over here. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when you…”

He slammed stop.

There somebody else’s voice had caught on the file. They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file. 

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist. “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check. Since we’re stopped, you know.”

“Warn me next time.”

“Your Siren intuition didn’t tip you off?”

She growled and she sat down in the puddle of her pants, her back towards him. 

The shuttle was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her. Troy didn’t though. She wasn’t in the mood to play Siren, so she wasn’t in the mood to play at all.

Soon, there wouldn’t be any playing about it.

Maybe that was what kept bothering her. That waiting to go live utterly as herself, to make a mark in the sky.

There wasn’t any sky here, of course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	3. Chapter 3

The extrapolation program wound off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

After a while, Tyreen stole the Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the case. Now and then she peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

The jump drive reported usable quiescence. Troy sneezed and couldn’t find his handkerchief. His sister swore and started to get back into bed. Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor even though that was chalky with the footprints of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days. Startup had lasted so long, but he’d fumbled through it, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do. The actual jump, that used no time at all besides the drive engaging and disengaging. But when they’d settled back into being, the numbers on the shuttle clock had seemed off, as though some time had passed, but some time had also somehow  _ un _ passed.

As far as the time part of spacetime cared, they were no closer and no further from their goal.

Well, her goal.

She’d  _ taken _ him. Just  _ taken _ him, and now…

Now there his sister lay, dissolved against the dirty ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm. Nothing,” Troy said. “I was thinking about when we were kids. That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one.” Back when they’d shared it with almost no complaints. 

“Yeah. That. That was a thing, I guess.” Tyreen sat up, but hunched over. The Coeus rattled in her grasp. Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots. “I’m eating now. You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway. Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d lifted from the stores back at the homestead. He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs. Did she want eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One of the baby Djira mewing in their own slime? She looked up to the ceiling before she chose. A faint shudder crossed her. Troy thought she might have swallowed a sneeze of her own. Anyway, she took two green, leathery eggs, but looked over her shoulder to the rest of her food as she left it behind.

She and he hunched together on a sheet of violet air algae. Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him. As he reached for the bread, she shoved one of the eggs at him. “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed. Speaking of memories from when they were children, Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand. He smiled and he did this for her, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the shuttle, get into the instruments. 

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside. It turned to dust. “Well, that squirmed. Nice.”

“Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again. He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super.

This time, his sister stayed staring at her dirty knees. She waited to suck up her second helping of squirm. “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly, “then we’ll deal wi-…”

In a flash, she leeched the other egg, sloppily this time, sand leaking between her toes. She also grabbed the bread and stuck it in Troy’s mouth. Her power spilled into him through the skin of his cheek where she drummed her knuckles. It tasted mineral bright and made his mouth water.

She swept off, burrowing into the bed before he could thank her. 

She didn’t have to feed him. She  _ chose _ to. That was the whole reason he’d been brought to the shuttle at all. 

The whole reason he’d been  _ taken _ .

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up. The Djira chuffed in their cages as though night had fallen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	4. Chapter 4

Tyreen sat in the bed. She left the Coeus in the charging station and kept scratching her ankles. Suddenly, she tugged her socks off, tossed them aside and toppled with the blanket until she ended up beneath it. She turned the lights down and resumed watching the space above her.

“Hey, Troy?” she said. 

“Hey yeah,” he answered, turning in the seat for the navigation console. The old bearings hissed. 

“Who decides which way the ceiling goes in these things?”

That didn’t sound like a  _ her  _ question. It held too much potential to wander. It also did, echoing in him as he considered if she really wanted an answer or not. In a way too, it made sense. Space brought no horizon for her to navigate, no right side of a marrow bone to climb. “Well, that’s the same place the ceiling went wherever it was built. There’s no up out here.”

“Right, right.”

“No North either.”

“So we can’t get to Pandora upside down?” she asked that last part in a slow, measured voice. 

“We actually cannot do that. But we are…” Troy pointed towards the viewscreen. “…somersaulting real slow that way if you see the stars changing at the edges. It’s just with the gravity on, we’re not  _ experiencing _ that part.”

“OK, OK. I get it. I’m gonna sleep now.” She turned over, back to him, clenching the covers. “Saving my excitement for later or whatever.”

He could tell she was still hungry, the way she bundled up with the blanket tight around her shoulders. Troy didn’t mention it though. Instead, he said, “Excitement shouldn’t be much longer.”

There was no answer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	5. Chapter 5

Troy listened for his sister’s breathing to even out. With her asleep, the shuttle took on an abandoned place kind of quiet, as though it was part of a ruin. It felt oddly familiar, but he’d grown up playing in ruins, his sister’s presence edging out the loneliness of all the years stranded in the Eridian ‘liminal places’, temples for short.

The water and oxygen cycler ran every fifteen minutes, bubbling at the end. The fans for the computer equipment hummed in a way that reminded him in particular of the red towers back on Nekrotafeyo. The Djira murmured at one another through the dried scrub that made up their cages and the chemical smell of their slime.

He listened, alert for any change in the rhythm of it all. He swung towards his pack, slipping his fingers inside and feeling around until he brushed a familiar cord.

The headphones were older than him, their audio tinny and erratic given the patches on the wires. 

Troy held one pad to his ear. The jack filled with static as he tabbed back to the errant audio file. He set the volume down low and pressed play.

There was music— synth and beats and wind instruments. Some other sound too, weather or distant conversation. 

Then, Dad’s voice. “Well, if this isn’t some sweet dame over here. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when girls act all shy. No, wait, wait, wait…” a swish of movement followed, besides strains of laughter. Typhon. And a woman. “…there’s some fancy word for that.”

“Coy? Coquettish?” Her voice was light as sunshine, ephemeral and gone someplace in the worn-out speaker. “Well, Mr. DeLeon, what’s the big idea? I followed you back to your little ship.”

“No, no. It’s a boat. Ships are big. Got names.”

“So I must be anything but shy. Riiight?”

“You know I put the recorder on.”

“Oooh. That’s kinky.”

There was a kiss.

Troy swallowed. He shut the playback off and pulled the headphones out of the jack.

He breathed like he’d been under water long enough to make his ears throb.

He breathed and breathed until the cycler ran and Tyreen snuffled in her sleep.

The locator program still hadn’t produced a result. It seemed to be running slower again. Feeling over the housing for the processor, he didn’t think it felt any warmer than the rest of the shuttle, so it wouldn’t be a mechanical issue. Hopefully. 

Troy stood and stretched. He tried to wash his face in the water closet, but that got him cold. In the end, he went over to the bed, still damp, and he pressed himself into the smallest space beside his sister that he could manage.

The bed was damned uncomfortable, lumpy and musty and too short for him. Besides, he had no way to match the fold of his knees to Tyreen’s. What position he did find wasn’t a comfortable one.

He rubbed at his eyes, tracking water off of his lashes. In his out-of-focus mind’s eye, he saw his father, a shadow of a woman draped elegantly beside him as they each breathed wine on the microphone.

He also saw himself, curled up below the bed, arm wrapped protectively around his head.

That looked even less comfortable than he felt.

But he was too tired to move his hand from where it rested.

Somewhere in her sleep, Tyreen pulled it tighter to her hips and sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	6. Chapter 6

He should have known. She had a look that night, this centered, selfish gravity. Her hands had bothered his as they worked, sweeping after keys, tools, curls of his hair. She had looked at him like she would bite if he came too close, but also if he tried to pull away.

If stories were lies he’d wanted to believe, he’d believed down to the depths of his guts that it wasn’t true anymore: the hope the jump drive from the research crew’s ship had given them, it had changed her. She didn’t hate Dad anymore. 

But what would Dad himself have said about her expression in that moment, the two of them hunched over the console? Of course — her eyes were shining. ( _ Like stars _ , Troy thought to himself, now that he’d seen stars from the desolation of space.) 

“It’s time,” said Tyreen. “Do you have everything you want, Troy? No coming back.”

“No coming back? I… I thought you said we were fixing the ship for him. You lied!”

“I told you a story.” She smiled, even through the anger in her voice. 

_ No _ , he begged himself,  _ don’t let her mess with  _ that _. Not now. _

But she did. “Stories are just lies we want to believe. What Dad tells us?  _ Those _ are the lies. So… you coming or not?”

Troy felt his future snap like a rusted screw. “Like I have a choice!

“True. Listen, Troy. There’s nothing for us here. C’mon, let’s take off before he finds us.”

The shot of whining desperation in her voice nearly drove him to tears. Instead, his anger flickered out. Then his hurt. His love too. Troy felt only a dull confusion. “Where are we going?” 

“Pandora.” Tyreen’s fingers dripped through his own. She squeezed so tight he could feel her heart beating.

It had been such a long time since she’d touched his hand for no reason. He realized though she did have a reason. She wanted him.

Almost as much as she wanted something for herself.

“Then there’s some stuff we should go back for,” Troy said, his words scraping.

Hers slid along. “Alright. I guess. I figured we could buy it or kill it when we got there.” Tyreen, still holding him, shrugged.

“But what about the things we  _ can’t _ ?” 

“Look, I got Mom’s sparker. There are guns on Pandora. What more do we want?”

“Let me go back for what  _ I _ want and I’ll stop complaining.”

“It’s a small ship. Don’t be an ass about it, OK?”

“I won’t.”

“Hurry,” she said and she kissed him on the temple even as her nails bit into him.

Troy ran to the homestead. He grabbed the bag he had already started and he packed one more for his sister. He filled them with all things he couldn’t ever find again, not even on Pandora.

He came back from gathering them to find Tyreen waiting for him in the night. She said, “I want to go. I  _ can’t _ anymore.”

So they left it like that and she still hadn’t opened her bag to see what mementos he’d chosen for her.

He wondered if she’d think it was funny he’d known where Mom had stashed her baby teeth, but not what had become of his own. There were some of Dad’s old coins too and an animal skull she’d used to play with. But that was  _ her _ bag.

His own. He wondered about his own. Had he missed anything?

Probably not. He’d started it as soon as they’d begun working on the shuttle together.

So he’d known from the beginning that all of their work was the end of something in their lives. Troy though hadn’t understood how far or how much it would hurt to leave in the end.

That felt like years ago now. It hadn’t even been three days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021. I did the transcription for "Not Coming Back II" myself, so any errors are my own. Is it just me, or does it sound like 2-3 conversations pasted together? I wrote this with some intention of explaining the incongruity, though I'm sure mileage will vary on how well I did. 
> 
> Also, if you'd like some context for Tyreen's hatred of Typhon in this 'verse, or for your own reading material, might I suggest "Sunt Lacrimae Rerum", found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28250679 .


	7. Chapter 7

Tyreen didn’t look back. Troy did. Now they were nowhere together. 

He could have been at home in bed, feverish and weak. That would have unsettled him less than this nothingness beside her, the twist of tension even in the way she slept.

He could have been back on Nekrotafeyo, watching the stars through the pieces of the broken planet still stranded in this upper atmosphere (hearing her talk about how she could feel North in her chest, of course she could!) 

(He could have been by himself too, strung out on his own creeping ideas of tomorrow. Well, look where tomorrow had brought him.)

(Nowhere.)

Tyreen chased him out of the way so she could head to the water closet. One of the hexlings chittered at her as she passed and she flipped it off. She stayed in, swearing for a while, as Troy pressed himself to the wall side of the bed. He left her the blanket and squeezed his ratty toes between the mattress and the wall.

He almost slept again before the toilet flushed and she returned. She ground herself to his back, so close he could taste her breath when she sleep-sighed. 

Troy thought he heard her scuffling away before he drifted off again, but it must have been the shuttle itself. His last awareness was of her touch making his back and his markings creep with heat. 

Eventually, they got up together. It might have been before dawn. Troy ate a slice of bread and Tyreen a Djira. She swung around to the consoles with one of its claws dangling between her fingers. “Yeah, that one was no good for you. This part didn’t poof. Must have already been rotted.”

“Sure,” said Troy. “Look what I got.”

Tyreen peered over. A snicker flowed from her. She pointed to a globule of brightness wedged in the very corner of the viewscreen. “Pandora’s that way! Yes!”

Recalling his thought from earlier, that maybe she could spy their destination between all of the emptiness, Troy laughed too. Besides, there weren’t even other stars in the way. He minded the nothing a lot less, knowing that. “Pandora’s where we’ll be in like ten minutes. Just gotta get us cued up.” He made a show of gliding his hand up the charge slider for the jump drive screen. “Well, and then a day or two while we pull into the system and land. I’m not gonna take us in super close ‘cause of…”

“Yeah, yeah. We’re almost there!”

“We’re almost there!” 

The parameters for the jump hadn’t saved. Troy muttered to himself as he punched them back in. He wanted the shuttle to appear this many AUs from the planet, LaGrange points to be avoided in case of debris or sudden space stations. Time was as soon as possible. Gravity would have to go since weight interfered with the drive’s mechanism. 

As Tyreen fiddled with the Coeus, he announced, “Heavy off on three. Three!”

His sister, reader in hand, pushed up on her toes, floating towards the ceiling as her supper squealed and the fan in the water closet took up stray condensation droplets. 

This was a much smaller jump than the last one. It took only minutes for the system to finish processing how to suck them through spacetime. 

A chime sounded. Troy hovered his hand over the execute button, wiggling an eyebrow at Tyreen and daring her to hit it first. She lunged. He brought his fist down. She pulled his hair as he laughed again.

And then nothing.

_ Unknown Error _ said the jump drive display. Nothing else changed. There wasn’t even another sound. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	8. Chapter 8

He tried the jump to Pandora again. And then a third time. 

Tyreen snarled as though she knew that he’d repeated himself long before the silent confirmation lit up the screen.

Then she said nothing and her silence sloughed off on his nerves. Troy could feel his whole body waiting for her to slam in, fill his awareness. She didn’t though. She swam off from the navigation console and she dived up to the ceiling. Her hair spread like crinoid tendrils as she bobbed back and forth and back and forth.

In a fit of movement, she’d flipped herself over, hanging on another line he could not guess.

Troy watched all of this in the console coating. He turned to tell her something. He didn’t exactly know what it would be. 

Tyreen lunged away. He heard her swear, but sudden cycler sounds covered her words. She braced herself upside-down in the shadows of the cages. She hissed and scratched herself.

Troy had never consciously realized how  _ feral _ his sister behaved sometimes. It dawned on him now in a simple sort of way.

She had always been that, he supposed— his sister. His playmate. That voice up ahead of him on the trail. The qualities of her company hadn’t mattered. She was all he had for any of that. 

And sisters lied sometimes. All the funnier to catch him with his hunting gear unfastened or to drag him off on a treasure hunt or to suddenly throw her arms around him in a way that left him breathless. The last one was almost a game, right?

But soon, other people would know her. Would they realize? That she was wild? That she lied? That she’d  _ taken _ him?

“What?” demanded Tyreen.

So she was watching him back.

“Figuring,” he said.

He’d been trying so hard to think of something other than where they’d found themselves. He’d tried until it hurt and now his thoughts were those of a tired boy, not, well, whatever he was. Someone who’d thought nothing of stuffing a gatcha machine soldier toy into his bag of memories, but who still believed he could put starships together.

His attention moved over the virgule on his wrist. He placed his hand on the side of the console, stranding fingerprints behind. Then he slid himself underneath.

One thing at a time. He’d check the control wires. Her eyes would skim the back of his neck. 

He’d think about circuits and pretend.

It was one thing to walk in the footsteps of a toothy, little hunter like his sister. It was another to be alone with her in the middle of nowhere, small streaks of metal between them and that nowhere, a jump drive from a disparate company to get them out of that unplace. To see her and remember so many things besides his soldier.

Tyreen bit sometimes. End of that story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021. I'm using "virgule" as in "slash mark" for the wide, red blotch that looks like it goes from his wrist to the back of his hand. Also, more people should use the word "virgule" in general.


	9. Chapter 9

The console wiring checked out. Troy pried up the floor panel and inspected the crystalline fibers connecting to the internal parts of the jump drive. Sometimes the things shattered. He’d brought some refurbished lines in case that happened. The data flow reported as normal from both the mini interface on the drive itself and all three ports he tried on the console. He could start most of the diagnostics on the drive from the shuttle controls he found, though some of the more granular tests would only initiate locally. “Gravitational field detected. Failsafe confirmation in five… four…” and then a shuddering click at zero. 

The internal parts of the drive further showed no issues with the external portion.

Troy sighed. He pulled his legs out of the equipment well. His left hip popped. A dull burn started in his thigh muscles. He’d been sitting for too long with the gravity on. Now that the adrenaline of the last jump attempt faded out, he was left with stress substances that would rot into more pain. Plus, he wanted to wash his face for real and with water that wasn’t stale. 

Tyreen sat with her back to the water closet door. Soon, she’d head in. 

She’d been moving in a circuit through the cabin: drinking from the water cycler, grinding to herself, water closet, dozing, back to the cycler until she dribbled down the front of her shirt.

“So hey,” Troy said. 

She narrowed her eyes at him. 

“I need the Coeus. It’s got the manual for the jump drive.”

“What good’s the manual gonna do!” Tyreen snapped. “It says ‘Unknown Error’. There’s no ‘unknown error’ in the index. What the hell sense would that make anyway?”

“You looked?”

Tyreen yanked the Coeus out of its cradle and flung it at him.

Troy scrambled to catch it, landing facedown on the dirty floor.

Snickers flowed from her and the suppers she’d disturbed with all the sudden movements. 

His elbow ached now too. Troy laid the Coeus down in front of him and tried to straighten out his back. He drummed his fingers until the static in his muscles died down. “I know that’s all you’ve got to do.” He did his best to lead her to maybe lending him a hand. This was kind of a one-person job, but it might keep her mind occupied if she would pass him tools, read him pages. She read well. He almost hoped she’d agree for that reason alone.

Instead, Tyreen went to the cages. She took a hexling by the neck, spilling sand and then grabbing the vacuum, the sound which got everything screaming.

Troy slapped the Coeus on his knee until the screen worked again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated 2/8/2021


	10. Chapter 10

The way he saw it, they had three possible problems.

He’d botched the internal installation. The jump drive wasn’t like any of the surviving equipment from Dad’s ship proper that he’d had to practice on. Sod’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will— at the worst possible moment. His handiwork was a pretty big anything.

They’d botched the external installation somehow. It was supposed to be simple: affix a box someplace nothing else would interfere. They’d placed that box roughly beneath the viewscreen camera. The two might have started chattering to one another. In that case, they had no suits to spacewalk; no way to move the two further apart. It might be possible to compensate for the interference,  _ but _ … 

What if the external portion had broken during the jump? That was appreciably the worst case. They had a chance of reaching  _ somewhere _ with a malfunctioning external unit. A broken one and this, the shuttle, was everything they had left.

Tyreen stirred on the bed. 

Troy told himself it was an internal issue. He could fix that, even if he had to take the whole jump drive out and put it back in. That ran the risk of damage, but they might already be drowning in damage.

Might be. Could be. Sworn to issues he couldn’t perceive.

The only thing driving him crazier sneered at him from the shuttle’s directories. 

He needed a break, even if the one alternative thing for him to do left him slippery inside with an anxiety he couldn’t quite define. Once again, Troy took the headphones out. He pretended that he jacked them into the Coeus, even though the Coeus had no sound output. 

He took a deep breath and he listened. 

“Well, if this isn’t some sweet dame over here. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when girls act all shy. No, wait, wait, wait, there’s some fancy word for that.”

“Coy? Coquettish? Well, Mr. DeLeon, what’s the big idea? I followed you back to your little ship.”

“No, no. It’s a boat. Ships are big. Got names.”

“So I must be anything but shy. Riiight?”

“You know I put the recorder on.”

“Oooh. That’s kinky.”

Troy closed his hand on his knee and pressed down as hard as he could.

He went headfirst into the kiss sound, knowing it was there. He hadn’t even heard the whole thing the first time. His face got so hot listening now. 

“You know what else is different? You. Yeah, they don’t have girls like you on Pandora. It’s kinda rustic out there at the edge of everything that is and, you know.”

“I know I spent the whole party looking for you and now here I  _ am _ . It’s so crazy.”

“Everything’s crazy. But so what about that? We’re both gonna get something we want. I’m never going back to Pandora. I know it in my gun, it’s true. As they say on Pandora.” Dad smacked his lips in that thinking way he did sometimes. “Just like, you know, Pandoran flats, Pandora handshakes. Did I tell you that one already?”

“You can tell me again. Maybe after, Mr. DeLeon.”

There was static. Rustling clothes. A transmission beep. And then nothing. The recording ended.

Troy watched a handful of other bright spots vanish off of the side of the viewscreen. He wondered if this, however  _ this  _ ended, would find him sick of stars.


	11. Chapter 11

Troy worked until his eyes refused to stay open and he caught a sharp screw under the nail of his forefinger. He sat there, staring at the tiny wound until he felt his head tipping forward in another fit of his body reaching for sleep.

He picked himself up, staggering on his bare feet and toeing his way to the bed. No need to hit the lighting controls. His sister had done that the last time she’d gotten up to piss. The animals all slept. He stared at them a while in envy before pressing one knee to the mattress. 

Tyreen growled. “Get back to work, asshole.”

“I-I can’t,” said Troy. “I’m too tired.”

“Why?”

“‘cause my back hurts and I’ve been up for…” Their clock made no sense when he looked at it. 

The straggle of that thought gave his sister time to act. She rolled over, defiantly spreading herself over the mattress. 

Troy turned away to the floor. He could see himself curled up there. 

The floor wasn’t something he wanted. The bed felt so right. He ached to lay his bones there. But instead he knelt and he joined the image of himself. His skin prickled as he did. 

He was off his feet. He was down. He could rest. He’d slept in less comfortable places. At least here there was nothing to eat him in the night.

Time passed. He came so close to drifting off.

On the bed, Tyreen snickered. “What, give up already? Aren’t you mad, Bro?”

“What’s the point of being angry with you after what you did?” Troy spat.

Then he waited in this space between himself and sleep; waited like he was back on his saggy, old half a mattress, the one with ground beneath it, more or less.

He knew that he wasn’t. His heart stung.

That or some other part of him held to the worst of all cases: they were going to die out here.

It would be her fault for making him leave all sudden-like and then his for being stupid about the change in plans. He’d thought he’d had no choice. Of course he had a choice. There was always a choice, even if now, on the shuttle. He could wait for her to make sleep sounds. He could put the crystal cables around her neck or a hunting knife between her ribs. It would be so easy. She’d suffer less than he would, fading away without her.

Troy shivered. He opened his eyes. He stared at the red spreading down his arm as though it was blood and not some intrinsic part of his skin, of their beings. His gorge rose, but he swallowed it.

He’d never been so tired he’d thought of hurting her before; he’d never thought of hurting her before, ever. At least not seriously. And over a bed. It was just a bed. Silly thing to fight about considering they’d washed up in the innards of eternity.

He lay with his belly covered anyway, in case he was wrong about what waited for him while he dreamed. In case she’d had the same thought he had, but in reverse.

He hated not trusting her most of all, but he slept regardless. In that, he had no choice.


	12. Chapter 12

Tyreen screamed.

Troy smacked his knee on the side of the bed scrambling to his feet. He almost spun out onto the floor.

Her pupils were blown. She clawed at the wall. “Troy! Troy! Something’s wrong! Troy! There’s noise! Troy!”

“What!” He couldn’t hear anything over her. None of the emergency lights had tripped.

She stared at him. He felt it in his gut— she couldn’t see him. Not in any reasonable way.

There was this rustling beep. He didn’t recognize it.

Tyreen heard. She clutched her ears and she wailed so loud it made tension flare in his neck. 

It passed. She barely caught her breath and she tore at the wall again, groping across the seams, searching for something she could break. She shrieked and threw herself at the panels when she found nothing.

He was trying to talk, words slamming together. Calm down. Her name. Over and over until she finally surged into it, the thing that had set her off.

“Let me out! I can’t take it anymore!”

“Tyreen,  _ stop _ !” Troy grabbed her and tossed both of them over onto the bed. She fought him, still screaming. He got her fingers and her teeth in his face, her fist hard enough on his temple to draw blots of color into his vision. When she tried to bring her knees up he smacked her down as hard as she could. She was still saying it the whole time: “Let me out! I want out! Stop it! Get off me!”

“No! Quit it!”

All at once she went still. She had him by the hair with one hand, the other drawn back. The light came back in her eyes.

Troy blew in her face to try to get her to breathe. 

She did, but she settled, settling on what was for her a pretty half-assed slap.

On the console, the alarm sounded again.

Tyreen gasped. She covered her face with her palms and fought to squirm away.

Troy pulled away from her, little by little, trying not to startle or leave her much room to hurt herself. She got very still once she had no more of his weight on her and he chanced sliding the rest of the way, hoping he could make it to the console before the sound came again.

A single notice flicked on the screen. 

He read it three times to make sure he knew what it said. Then he told her. “The cycler overcompensated for all of the toilet flushing. We’ve got a few too many pounds of air pressure in here. I need to decompress.”

Tyreen looked at him, her face blank.

“It’s gonna make another noise towards the bottom port side. OK?”

Rather than answer, Tyreen curled herself into a ball, covering her ears.

Troy confirmed the command. The venting sound started as a scuffle and some of the animals perked awake. Then a hiss lasted perhaps five seconds and the vent shut off with a chime.

His sister sagged as if the muscle tone had drained out of her.

Troy walked back to the bed. “You’re really scared, huh?” he said.

Tyreen didn’t answer.

“You could have said something.”

One more shiver passed over her, she moaned, putting her back towards him.

Troy, tired again after the adrenaline hit, went back to the floor.

In the few minutes before he slept again, he pretended he didn’t hear her whimpering. 


	13. Chapter 13

She was in the water closet when he woke up. Troy suspected she’d been there a while, still as everything felt, though the tightness rising in him also would have explained the sensation.

He needed his sister to feed him. She wasn’t there. He waited and had some bread, trading one sensation to ease another.

Whatever people had to eat on Pandora, and Dad had made it pretty clear that was nothing ordinary people were  _ supposed  _ to enjoy, Troy wanted it. Even if it made him sick the first time. He did. Besides, he wasn’t ordinary, sitting there wondering if he  _ could  _ enjoy food after so long eating what he had rather than what he liked.

He washed his face at the water cycler and filled the bowls for the animals. A few of the hexlings were starting to droop. He might be able to tempt them with some of his bread if it came down to keeping them alive longer than Tyreen had anticipated.

It might not. He crawled back to the console and the up-ended jump drive. As tired as he’d let himself get last night, he was going to have to recheck his last hour of work. He needed to remember what that had been. It was that or start over.

He didn’t want to start over. 

Once again the possibility troubled him. What if there was still nothing besides a perfectly fine jump drive that  _ didn’t work _ ?

There would also be Tyreen. 

He considered listening to the recording once more while she was occupied. Hearing Dad’s voice would at least give him something familiar besides the twinge of vacant bliss that was his body starting to shut down.

No. He needed fed. There was nothing for it. They weren’t getting anywhere until that happened. Troy stood. He moved to the water closet door, intending to knock.

Tyreen stamped out right before he did. She stared at the spread of equipment for a long while. 

“Hey,” said Troy, “About last night, I…”

She growled. He took a step back.

With him out of the way, she darted into the corner where she huddled, half in shadow, her arms over her head. 

Troy sighed. He wondered if it really was morning. He still couldn’t read the clock.

He got the bag he’d fixed for her out of his pack. He laid it where she could reach it, having given it a shake to stir the coins.

She didn’t seem to have heard them, or him, or anything at all since the pressure alarm had gone off. 


	14. Chapter 14

Tyreen fell back asleep a while into him picking around the glinting fibers with his smallest screwdriver, searching for flaws. They felt worn, but not broken beneath the blade.

He’d unhooked and reconnected  _ everything _ , swabbing ports that had already glistened with silica oil to make sure. He did that until there was nothing left but put the jump drive back and test it.

Troy listened. Was his sister quiet? Was she resting? Had she truly rested at all this whole trip?

_Serves her right_ _if not_ he thought through his chewed up bitterness.

Not long after, he took a break to rest his hand. If she stirred, she could show her anger at his laziness then. Just like Dad.

But no, she clung to the corner, sighing off and on.

He couldn’t make the shuttle bigger for her. He couldn’t make there be something outside. He had himself and the coins he’d brought for her to fiddle with. Exactly that. Nothing more. And she didn’t want the coins. 

Troy shook himself out. He still ached, but waiting had worn on him already.

He slid the jump drive back into place, reran the connection diagnostics and screwed all of the plating back into place.

Finished, he hesitated at the control console.

He looked one last time at the icon for the audio system settings and he thought of his father.

_ Dad _ seemed like the wrong word at the distance between them, the light years and the slow, pernicious chill where the man had only only really spoken to him if he was too drunk or hungover to remember he wasn’t talking to ‘the boy’ or ‘your brother’. So— Typhon DeLeon? No, Typhon was a monster in somebody else’s story. 

Troy touched the listing for the audio file. He did not play it again. 

_ Some part of you wanted to get away from your life as bad as she does now. It happened at least twice. But, why? You never said. What even was your ‘life’ to you, Dad?  _

(He still thought that word.)

_ That farm where you grew up? Pandora? The universe? Vault hunting? Us? Someone else? Your body, like I feel about…  _

(He glanced at the space where his right arm should have been.)

_...mine. But I never tried to get out of that the way you’ve tried to leave yourself behind. Some part of you wanted to fly and I know you chose not to say it out loud. It’s like she does. Like Mama did. _

Troy swallowed and turned in the chair. He would never see the place where they’d buried Mama again, but that was one of the few things they’d had left of her. That and her sparker, the only thing Tyreen had wanted on all of Nekrotafeyo, the planet they’d called theirs as children.

He said, “I’m turning the gravity off.”

“It’s fixed?” she murmured. 

And he didn’t answer.

She lifted into the air, floating listlessly as he loaded the extrapolated coordinates. 

Troy held his breath and pressed his whole hand down on the button.

_ Unknown Error _


End file.
